Cuban crisis deepens

I put up a post a couple of days ago about Cuba. Today, it seems as if the situation there is growing more confused, with conflicting information about what is going on with Fidel Castro's health, the failure of his designated successor, his brother Raul, to make a public appearance, and the call up of reservists and the placement of the military on 'high alert' status, apparently fearing a Bay of Pigs style invasion by Cuban exiles, maybe backed by U.S. military forces.

And the exile groups are making it sound as if that outcome could be more than just a delusional fantasy. Ramon Raul Sanchez, leader of an exile group called the 'Democracy Movement' says he is organizing a flotilla, despite calls from the Bush administration not to, and he will sail to the island "when the regime begins to crack."

In the post I made earlier this week, I said that the U.S., by relying on a hard line embargo exclusively as our only policy towards the Castro regime, has 'dealt itself out of the game' in terms of the future of Cuba. Many other countries, ranging from Hugo Chavez' Venezuela to Canada, China and European countries, have more influence in Cuba than we do. Our failure to develop a more constructive policy towards Cuba makes it likely that the only way the U.S. will be involved in post-Castro Cuba is violently, if the rumored invasion in fact occurs. And if it does, I suspect the Cuban people would see it as an invasion and defend themselves and likely to lead to the same outcome as the Bay of Pigs.

We had 47 years to reconsider our policy towards Cuba and replace the embargo with a more constructive relationship in preparation for the day that is either upon us right now, or will be upon us in not very much longer.

And our time to do anything more to prepare for it is now over.

Could the Lebanese army provide the needed solution?

Recently I've had the unusual experience of being in the minority on leftist blogs, and agreeing with the most hard core of right wingers on right-leaning blogs. Well, I call it like I see it.

The issue is the war in Lebanon. My own view is that the Israelis, having withdrawn from the area and subsequently been subject to small scale but escalating attacks from the area (which has been 'guarded' by an ineffective U.N. peacekeeping force), had little choice except to go on the offensive after the latest escalation, an attack by Hezbollah militants across the border on an Israeli army post, in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two were captured. If Israel continued to do nothing, or simply bombed some target in Lebanon and called it even, these attacks would continue and they would continue to escalate, until you saw the same full scale war between Israel and Hezbollah that you see today, except that it would be being waged inside of Israel instead of in Lebanon.

Of course, if Hezbollah had their bases in designated military areas like most nations do, we would not have seen this level of civilian casualties. But they don't. They have their 'bases' in the basements of apartment buildings, in schools, in hospitals, wherever they can find a place that the Israelis will be excoriated if they dare attack. They use harbors, airports and civilian highways as supply lines (and if the Israelis really wanted to just destroy Lebanese infrastructure as opposed to preventing resupply for Hezbollah, they would have also bombed the ports, but they haven't because they have a navy that can blockade ports so that bombing port facilities is unnecessary, and will allow quick movement of emergency supplies into Lebanon when this is over and airports and highways still have to be repaired.)They launch missiles into Israel from urban areas (for example, the missiles that have fallen on Haifa were launched from Tyre) and then get out the cameras and wait for the bombs to start falling. Israel has done what few other armies try to do in order to prevent civilian casualties. They have dropped leaflets in advance that state that they will bomb a particular area so that people can leave. And hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have left southern Lebanon. But there are those who can't leave, and those are the ones who end up on TV. In fact, a Lebanese website has how even leveled the accusastion that the children in Qana were invalid children (mostly severely mentally retarded) who were collected from local families and planted in the building by Hezbollah when then left a rocket launcher on the roof specifically for the purpose of making sure the Israelis bombed the building. I don't know if the Lebanese who run the site are right about that, but it is interesting that when the building did collapse on the children (eight hours after the actual bombing) there were representatives of every major news organization on hand, among the hundreds of bombing sites around southern Lebanon (of course until the building collapsed, the story was not particularly newsworthy because there were not yet any casualties).

The fundamental problem for Israel is this though: Hezbollah is committed to the destruction of Israel. It is hard to stop fighting with someone who refuses to stop fighting with you, who refuses to negotiate with you, and who is committed to your annihilation.

So what can be done? Assuming that Hezbollah will continue to exist (and at some level they will, no matter how successful the Israeli offensive eventually is) and that over time they will re-arm themselves, and will still attack Israel if they can, what can be done to prevent this outcome?

The answer is to not only take Lebanese President Emile Lahoud at his word from two weeks ago, when he said that the Lebanese army should deploy along the border with Israel, but prevent attacks on Israel from that area, but give him the power to make good on that pledge. Of course Lahoud is a friend of both the Syrians and Hezbollah, but he is also the President of Lebanon, which is his primary obligation, and is still the only person who has made a suggestion that has the potential to form the basis for peace. Lebanon (unlike Syria) has recognized and participated in negotiations with Israel in the past. The Lebanese government is a democracy, and sooner or later Lahoud will be replaced democratically by other leaders.

And the model already exists. Israel has two secure borders. That is, two borders across which there are no terrorist attacks, no infiltration by terrorists, and in fact which trade can pass freely across. Those are their borders with Egypt and Jordan, two neighbors who have recognized and made peace with Israel. Of course, both borders are still monitored and militarized (not surprising given the history of past wars and present tensions) but the fact is that the Egyption army prevents terrorists from setting up bases to attack Israel from Egyptiat territory and the Jordanian army does the same in Jordanian territory. There may be an occasional rocket fired from Aqaba into Elat as there has been on rare occasions in the past, but the Israelis tolerate that because they know when it happens that the Jordanians are right on it, arrest and try the guilty party if they are caught, and certainly beef up police presence in the area for long enough to prevent it from becoming a regular occurrence. The Israelis don't necessarily expect a 100% success rate in stopping terror by the Jordanians and the Egyptians (the Amman and Sharm el Sheikh bombings show that they can't even be 100% successful at stopping their own terrorists) but they are satisfied that the effort is being made and it is on the whole very successful.

We've seen that the U.N. peacekeepers are useless in this situation. Deployment by a foreign peacekeeping force that has the teeth to actually keep the peace, possibly including Americans, has been discussed by I think that would be a terrible idea. Such a force will be looked at as occupiers and will itself be subject to attack (as Americans were, at a high cost in blood, when Ronald Reagan briefly tried to intervene in Lebanon). Given that we are already stuck in a situation like that in Iraq and in Afghanistan thanks to George Bush's bungling of both wars, I see no benefit to America to being stuck in a third middle eastern country fighting a guerilla war. Nor is this an answer even without Americans, because eventually a foreign force would face domestic pressure to withdraw and then we would be back to where we are today. So that leaves the Lebanese army, which according to common sense should be the only army in Lebanon, as also the only option to form a force which is in fact the only army in Lebanon.

Lahoud's problem is that right now, the Lebanese army is weak. It is not even the strongest army in Lebanon when the Israelis are out of the country, being less powerful militarily than Hezbollah. The world will need to do two things to guarantee peace in the region-- 1. give the Lebanese army the military hardware and professional training it needs to battle either Hezbollah or Israel if necessary (though the former is much more likely-- the Israelis keep their word, and won't attack Lebanon if they are not attacked from Lebanon), and 2. (this is the more difficult task to be sure) give the Lebanese government the support it needs to become a real government, so that they will also have the backbone to fight Hezbollah if Hezbollah or some similar group decides to set up shop in southern Lebanon. The Jordanians and the Egyptians have established the model, now Lebanon needs to follow it.

And if they do, it could lead to bigger things. The Israelis have been willing to withdraw from land in exchange for peace in the past (for example they gave the Sinai back to Egypt), and if this kind of model worked in Lebanon then it might even set a clear roadmap for the Syrians (who still want Israel out of the Golan heights) and the Palestinians.

What next for Cuba?

Cancel the street party in Miami. Intestinal surgery on Fidel Castro was successful, and while he is still described as 'very sick,' it is clear that he will in time return to his job as the dictator of Cuba (barring any further setbacks). What this has done is turn the spotlight directly on Cuba. And for the first time, it is not shining so much on Cuba's past, but on Cuba's future. And that future is full of hope for Cuba. But not for the U.S. That is because we have dealt ourselves out of the game of what happens next in Cuba, by taking a hard line earlier and never allowing any American investment in Cuba. And that is a mistake. The embargo was created in the early 1960's, with the goal of forcing Fidel Castro from power. You can all see how successful that goal was. In fact, it has strengthened his hold on power. Constructive engagement, in which American trade led to the importation of American ideas, led to the fall of the Soviet Union and the rest of the eastern bloc. It has caused governments to make reforms in Vietnam and even in China. But Cuba is still the same old hard line communist state that it always has been.

For one thing, consider where Cuba's economy has been: Cuba found a willing market to replace the trade that they lost with the United States. Cuba joined COMECON, a Cold war era Soviet dominated trading bloc. Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, every time there were shortages or other problems in Cuba, Fidel Castro only had to say, "It's the Americans fault," or "Saboteurs from the outside are sabotaging our economy." It also gave him a convenient excuse to send his political opponents to prison.

Now's, it's a big world, full of a lot of countries that do business with Cuba. Foreign companies have been setting up vacation packages to various Latin American countries. That includes Cuba. They have developed business acumen on the island, and they have the contacts there that Americans don't.

Second, oil has now been discovered off the coast of Cuba. Already the choice parcels have been sold-- to European and Canadian companies. And as long as that embargo remains, Americans will be out in the cold on that one too.

Most importantly, we have no influence at all with anyone in Cuba-- and like any other country, there are a lot of people there with divergent views about the future. When Castro dies, the Cuban people will decide what to do next. But whatever it is, it is unlikely that the U.S. will have any influence at all on the future of Cuba. That's because we've dealt ourselves out of the game.

When it keeps happening, it's time to admit Mel Gibson has a problem with anti-Semitism.

We've all done it. Whether out of ignorance, out of a fit of anger, difficulty fitting words to a situation, of simply being stupid, we've all said something that we wish we had not said. And unlike a blog, in life there is no 'edit' or 'delete' button we can click to erase those words.

So do I think that someone ought to be tarred for life because of a single ill-conceived remark? No, I don't. So, for example, I am giving Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt for his saying that the Big Dig project was a 'tar baby.' He says he was unaware of the fact that the term has racial overtones, and as he has never before said anything that would suggest he is a racist, and as the context of the remark was about the faulty highway tunnel in Boston, and is easily understood as saying that the state has invested a great deal of time and money in a project that still is full of problems, I understand what he meant.

In contrast, Mel Gibson's apology, delivered by faxed statement today (several days after his DUI arrest in which he went on an anti-Semitic tirade according to the official police report), while certainly contrite (I'm sure Gibson's publicists edited it very carefully) is not enough to set aside either the fact that its lateness belies its sincerity, nor the fact that unlike Romney, this is not the first time that Gibson has come under scrutiny for anti-Semitism.

Of course it is natural that Gibson would, since his father, Hutton Gibson, has written extensively denying aspects of, as well as the scope of, the Holocaust. Hutton Gibson has not denied that it happened, but his articles argue against documented historical facts (in particular the fact that six million Jews were killed, a number supported both by Nazi archives and pre-war census data.) Of course Mel Gibson is not his father, but he has time and time again ducked the question of whether he agrees with his father. It would only take a simple statement, "Those are his opinions about the Holocaust and I don't agree with him about that," but he is not willing to even make that kind of a statement.

Then two years ago, Gibson was most in the news for his masterpiece, Passion of the Christ which graphically depicted the crucifixion of the Savior. He was again accused of anti-Semitism in the movie, but as Gibson pointed out at the time, the movie was based on the Bible, he tried to be accurate to what was in the Bible, and the description in the New Testament is not kind to Jews. The problem of course is that he never tried to make a distinction between the Jews who were written about in the Old Testament (who were themselves only a small proportion of the Jews who lived then) and the Jews of today, who are their descendants thousands of years later (and their descendants which include me-- I was raised Jewish although I am now LDS). The idea that anyone could be punished for whatever their ancestors did over the past 2000 years (which includes literally millions of ancestors-- do you know what all of yours did?) is ludicrous, except to idiots who believe that today's Jews are still guilty today for what Christ suffered then. Gibson, whose movie audiences included thousands of people who in fact do believe that, only made that distinction when pushed, and then not in a very impassioned manner. He could have made a real difference then, and one would think that if he really disagreed with his father, he would want to, understanding personally the concept of being judged by what his father has written.


However, when the New York Times' Frank Rich wrote a column suggesting that the movie could help fuel anti-Semitism abroad, Gibson's reply was disturbingly psychotic. Gibson, in an interview with the New Yorker magazine about Rich and his charges about anti-Semitism, declined to devote his ink to disputing the charges of potential anti-Semitism, but instead said about Rich, "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog."

I wonder what kind of a person would read that quote and still hold up Gibson as a man who exemplifies 'Christian values.'

So Gibson's outburst while he was drunk, if it were the first time that anti-Semitism had come up would likely be dismissed as the ravings of a drunk. But as addiction psychiatrist Bryon Adinoff said (quoted in today's USA Today), "Clearly Jews are on his mind."

Or, as Italians have a saying, "vino veritas" (wine makes truth; i.e. that a person who is drunk may lose his inhibition and say what he really thinks.)

Until he is willing to totally renounce anti-Semitism, including (in fact, specifically including) the anti-Semitic writings of his father, there is nothing that Mel Gibson can do that will convince me and many others who have seen this pattern repeated again and again and again that he is not an anti-Semite.

Senate should vote against inheritance tax cut.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about Congress' attempts to get rid of the inheritance tax. In the post I pointed out that the new limits of $5 million per individual and $10 million per family would be more than adequate to save farms and small family businesses. It is really about the plutocracy wanting to be able to pass on more future taxes and deficits to everyone else's grandchildren.

I wrote at the time,

They had in fact wanted to eliminate the tax entirely, but were prevented from doing it last year because the vote was to be taken just as the Katrina images were coming out of New Orleans and Americans would have been outraged by a tax cut for dead rich people when the bodies of dead poor people were being collected on sidewalks. And this year, there is an election coming and the Republicans are reading the poll numbers. So, there is only one year there will be no estate taxes at all-- in 2010 due to old legislation passed during the earlier rounds of Bush tax cuts. But it will still be back in 2011 (Wonder, in the event that they don't get a permanent repeal passed, whether in December of 2010 we will see a bunch of billionaires move to Oregon and get themselves declared terminally ill and get lethal injections?) and that is a good thing. With the new limits, any further estate tax cut would be clearly a tax cut aimed at plutocrats (which there are many of in Congress, and many more in Congress who have been wined, dined and given airplane rides by plutocrats). The case can be made that this cut was as well, but luckily it stopped short of going all the way.

And they are still pushing at it. Having failed to get it through on a straight up or down vote, Congressional Republicans attached it to the minimum wage bill going through the house. Now, I'd have no real problem conceptually if they, for example, wanted to give small businesses a tax break in order to prevent them from laying off any workers (although the list of jobs in America that are worth $5.15 an hour but no worth $7.25 an hour is a very short list indeed), but that isn't what this is about at all. It's a way to try and sneak their inheritance tax cut through on an unrelated bill.

And the Senate should stop this turkey cold. It may be necessary to raise the minimum wage on a state by state basis (possibly by referendum) and this may not be a bad thing-- although the current minimum wage is too low in every state, an argument could plausibly be made that a living wage in, say, Connecticut is significantly different from a living wage in Arkansas. However, getting rid of estate taxes is a bad idea, a tax cut for the super-rich that Americans as a whole realize that we will all have to pay for in the future, foolish in the face of enormous deficits, and the Senate should vote to defeat this bill, whatever else it may or may not have in it.

Posting at Cold Hearted Truth

I have recently been added as a poster on a fourth blog, Cold Hearted Truth (at least on the blog's Senate page, which is a page devoted to tracking current races (not just Senate, also Gubernatorial and Congressional races). I will provide commentary on races that I see polling data for here in Arizona.

Unlike the other blogs that I post on, Cold Hearted Truth is decidedly not a liberal blog. The primary host of the blog is in fact a self-described RINO (a Republican with some libertarian tendencies on social issues). However, to his credit, he has welcomed in a very broad range of commenters, so that on the blog you will see discussions involving people from the far left (including at least one who is to the left of myself) to the far right-- and (this is amazing) very little in the way of put downs or attacks (although occasionally some 'left handed compliments.') That is one reason I've always liked going to CHT-- as much as I enjoy reading liberal blogs, I like having a place to go where I find an array of opinions. And unlike right wing blogs, I don't get attacked the minute I post a comment, although the comment may be attacked (which is perfectly legitimate).

About half of the boards on CHT are about polling of various political races (for example, I just put up a post on the Arizona Governor's race, because there was a poll taken on the GOP primary here (and it's hard to see how Republicans could find the poll results encouraging by the way). In fact, I have to be careful for a number of reasons about discussing Arizona Democrats, although I will certainly post polling results when there are any. And I will post them there, because it is a good site to look for polling results on.

The other half of the boards feature mostly political commentary (as I said earlier, the blog has a distinct lean to the right). Since I'm only posting on the Senate page, my presence there is limited to comments, but anyone can join and comment (all you have to do if you are not a member is hit the 'register' button before you can post-- and you don't even have to give a real email address, it's something CHT added to fight spam.

So go ahead and drop by over there, especially if you want to be challenged thoughtfully by someone who may not agree with you.

Nuclear proliferation

The U.S. House this week gave approval to a nuclear cooperation deal with India.

Though the agreement deals with civilian nuclear cooperation, and in any event India has already built nuclear weapons using material that they already have, some concerns were raised that this may send the wrong message.

And I agree that it might. But maybe we need to reconsider the message in the first place.

First of all I have no problem with the United States working cooperatively with India or any other friendly nation in a matter that is ultimately one of commerce. If the Indians want to purchase nuclear reactor parts and fuel and we don't consider it a security threat to sell it to them, then by all means we should sell it to them.

The problem that this raises is that as we consider that India is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has in fact developed nuclear weapons, it seriously undercuts any grounds for objection we might have to China, Russia or other nations selling nuclear components or material to nations like North Korea or Iran, which we have in the past cited the non-proliferation treaty to argue against.

And certainly the Russians or the Chinese will take note of this congressional vote (which itself is only a small step in the sequence of events which will need to take place before a single American nuclear component or fuel rod is shipped to India) next time Condoleeza Rice or someone else tells them not to sell things like this to Iran and say, "Well, you're doing it." The perception that Iran is a bigger threat to peace than India is an American perception. The Chinese, whose relations with India have always been chilly and who fought a war with India in 1962, but have always had cordial relations with Iran and especially with North Korea, have much the opposite view to ours about which nation is a greater threat.

While this argument is valid, I would suggest that we consider a different approach entirely.

To begin with, we must realize that the idea that we can prevent anyone from developing technology that we had sixty years ago (including the ability to enrich uranium) is ridiculous. That genie left the bottle years ago. We must also realize that India, Pakistan and North Korea have essentially made a mockery of the whole idea of non-proliferation in the first place. If we want the world to take this all seriously, then we need to draw a new line, which acknowleges where we are now, not where we were during the Cold War, and which the world can get behind. Then show enough leadership to get the world committed, instead of mucking it up with a 'go it alone' agenda.

In fact, I made such a proposal a year ago. It was when I made my second post, On Nuclear Proliferation and Iran. I'm not sure very many people saw it because I didn't even advertise that I had a blog outside of my immediate circle of blogger buddies. And the proposal would otherwise have been very controversial, and certainly frought with danger, but it is realistic. If you read the whole post you will see the whole analysis, and with the benefit of hindsight I believe it would be better for the U.S. to work towards getting a commitment in advance from other nations than to try and do it ourselves, but here is what I said last year (with the inclusion of ideas to make it less unilateral):

How about a nuclear version of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ that focuses not on the development of nuclear weapons, but rather makes it plain that any nation which uses them in war will be at war with the United States and a coalition of other countries that signed the 'anti-use' treaty (replacing the anti-proliferation treaty) and can expect a ‘regime change?’. How can a country avoid this? Simple, build your nukes, fight your wars, but DON’T USE THE NUKES IN THE WARS. Is this fail-safe? No. And where we can make it as difficult as possible for other countries to get nukes, we should still do so. But instead of invoking a now routinely violated line that countries should not build nukes (which Pakistan, India and North Korea have already made a joke out of), we have a better chance of making a new line stick, and I suspect it is a line which, despite its unilateralism, would be welcomed by the world. The beauty is that such a direct statement does not make any distinction between nations, either based on current or future alliances or rivalries. And in case a terrorist group blows up a nuke, develop the intelligence (which we already pretty much have) that can analyze the results and determine where the bomb came from. Uranium from different sources has different types of impurities so it would not be that hard to determine.

Is this controversial. Absolutely. But it is a more realistic approach than a haphazard approach of 'Tweedle-dee can build nukes and we'll help him build them, but tweedle-dum can't, because we trust tweedle-dee but not tweedle-dum.'

Andrea Yates verdict.

Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity a few minutes ago for the drowning deaths of her children.

And that is a good verdict, because she is clearly a very sick woman, and not the cold, calculating killer that the prosecution tried to paint her as. It's bad enough that in a high profile case like this, a prosecutor apparently motivated by his need to pander to the 'hang 'em high' mentality that he was willing to ignore even basic common sense. Andrea Yates is not a psychopathic killer, but a woman with a disease of the brain. Does she need to be confined to protect the rest of society from her? Absolutely. But should she be sent to prison for the rest of her life? Absolutely not. Even her husband Rusty, who is the father of the children she killed, asked today after the verdict why the prosecution was trying to send her to prison when what she needs is treatment. It seems that we have become so obsessed with preventing some con artist from 'gaming the system,' much like Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that we have gone to the point where the truly sick are sent to prison, as she was after being found guilty after her first trial. But what has happened since has shown that our whole system is rotten to the core, and it is fortunate that after the case was over, the rottenness was discovered and she was given a new trial.

What we have seen in that case is a flaw in our justice system. Yates was found guilty at her first trial. The reason was largely because of the testimony of an 'expert,' Dr. Park Dietz, who claimed that she was basing her actions on a television show, an episode of 'Law and Order' in which a woman who drowned her children was acquitted by reason of insanity. Obviously, if this were true, then that would be enough to prove that she had thought things through ahead of time and had a plan to kill the children, and likely that her claims to insanity were part of a broader plan. That would be enough to show criminal intent and that is why the first jury found her guilty. Only one problem. The episode in question never existed. So either Dr. Dietz made it up, or he didn't even bother to verify what may have been a rumor he heard. Either way, it raises troubling questions about so-called 'experts' testifying on the stand.

The truth is, that most insanity claims fail in court. But the broader issue raised is that with both sides in a court case often able to call 'hired guns' who will testify as 'experts' to whatever the side that is paying them wants, our court system has become bastardized to the point where it is not so much about trying to determine whether a person is guilty and the best course of action, as about who can simply put on the best 'expert' At the very least we should have the right to expect the experts to BE experts.

And if a person is as sick as Andrea Yates, most prosecutors will arrange a plea deal. That might have happened here had the case not made national headlines, and especially in Texas any prosecutor who agreed to it, even if it was the right thing to do, would be roasted alive in the court of public opinion.

ABA: Bush is violating the Constitution.

The other day I put up a post on all the President's vetos (all one of them) in which I wrote,

There is another, more insidious reason the President has not previously issued a veto. That is because he has often accompanied the signing of bills that he does not like with 'signing statements' in which he claims the right to negate parts or all of them. The most obvious example of this was the prohibition on torture that the Senate passed. He signed it with a statement that he could ignore the provisions 'in the event of a national emergency.' Since he also gets to decide when it is a 'national emergency,' the effect of this is that he ignores the law and acts as though it didn't exist (essentially returning to the conditions that caused the Senate to pass the law in the first place.) What this makes it clear is that this President believes he is above the law.

In fact, I even used too strong a term. He isn't even saying he should be able to ignore the law in case of 'national emergency,' his signing statements have used the term 'national security.' What is national security? The President's hangnail? All we know is that he gets to decide when it is. So we have a President who decides when and to what extent he will obey the law.

I'm not the only one troubled by this. Today, the American Bar Association (yes, the same one that the President cited as having issued 'highly qualified' ratings for John Roberts and Samuel Alito), said that the President is violating the Constitution.

The ABA group, which includes a one-time FBI director and former federal appeals court judge, said the president has overstepped his authority in attaching challenges to hundreds of new laws.

The attachments, known as bill-signing statements, say Bush reserves a right to revise, interpret or disregard measures on national security and constitutional grounds.

"This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy," said the ABA's president, Michael Greco. "If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries."

Of course it threatens the foundation of our democracy. If a President has the right to only follow the laws when he decides to, then he is by definition no longer a President but a dictator. And keep in mind that if this precedent is allowed to stand, then not only will George W. Bush be invested with what are effectively dictatorial powers, but so will every President who comes after him. The consequences of this are frightening to contemplate.

Doctor and two nurses charged with murder for 'mercy' killings post-Katrina.

Last week, the state of Louisiana filed second degree murder charges against Anna M. Pou, a doctor at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, and Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, two nurses at the same hospital.

According to the complaint,

BEFORE ME, the undersigned authority, personally came and appeared Virginia B. Rider, Special Agent for the Louisiana Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who, having been duly sworn, did depose and say that Anna M. Pou, Lori L. Budo and Cheri A. Landry did violate La. R.S. 14:24(30.1), Principal to Second Degree Murder, on or about September 1, 2005, by intentionally killing multiple patients by administering or causing to be administered, lethal doses of morphine sulphate (morphine) and/or midazolam (Versed), at Memorial Medical Center located at 2700 Napoleon, New Orleans, Parish of Orleans, State of Louisiana.

This is a very complex case, and in some ways is unprecedented. We know that the conditions that existed after Katrina were apalling, and no one is contending that most, if not all, of the patients who were given these injections were in desperate straits, with their normal medication gone, the hospital itself severely damaged, and too sick to move to another facility. So if they had not received the lethal injections, it is quite possible, as the defendants contend, that they would have died and done so in a great deal of agony.

At the same time, the claim that this is akin to voluntary euthanasia is wrong. Let me start by saying that over the years I have changed my position to where I now support the right of terminally ill patients to be euthanized. I had a concern in the past about whether it was moral to take the life even of someone who is near death, but then it seems odd that we would deny a human what we give to a dog or a cat, and as such I have come to my current position of believing that it is the right of patients to make their own decisions on end of life issues. However, in the cases cited, the patients were too ill to even provide consent (though even if they had it would not have been considered legally valid in Louisiana), and their family members were not consulted. Not that there was any way to do that, but nevertheless the family members were not consulted.

I took the time this week to contact Compassion and Choices about their take on this. I received an email back indicating that they have discussed it quite a bit but are bothered by the fact that there was no consent, and as such will wait for the trial to take its course.

And take its course it should.

If in fact it turns out that the accused did kill patients, but did so in extreme and horrible circumstances that no doctor should ever have to face and did so as they believed out of mercy, then it might be appropriate that there is both a guilty verdict (thereby setting case law and making it clear that in the absence of consent this should not have been done) and a pardon (thereby acknowleging the circumstances and allowing this doctor and these two nurses, who by all accounts have always done their jobs very well, to go back to work saving lives, instead of sitting in prison for a decision that honestly none of us can say what we would do if we were in their shoes.)

The President Embarrasses America Yet Again.

Just suppose that you are a man working for a company, and you are at an important business meeting, where you are discussing matters of grave importance with your peers at other corporations. You walk up behind a female who is your equivalent elsewhere, whom you've only met briefly before and had some phone conversations with, and suddenly you grab the back of her neck and her shoulders and give her an uninvited back rub. Of course if you are a half way intelligent male (I like to think I am) you know better than to even think about something like that in today's society. And if you did it, you would probably be fired from your job (and would deserve it).

Whether she chose to call it sexual harrassment or not, it is clearly over the line. Yet that is exactly what President Bush did at the G-8 summit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A 5-second video and series of photographs recently posted on YouTube.com and various blogs show Bush surprising Merkel at the G-8 Summit by quickly rubbing the back of her neck and shoulders. The chancellor immediately hunches her shoulders, throws her arms up and grimaces, though she appears to smile as Bush walks away.

What else could she do? Her immediate reaction shows what she thought about it.

Of course, if Bill Clinton did this (and he never had the gall to initiate inappropriate physical contact a foreign leader in front of the world) it would be an impeachable offense. But the people who think Bush can do no wrong will probably laugh it off. And no, this isn't an impeachable offense but it definitely rises to the level of a national embarrassment. As am American, I would like to express my apologies to Chancellor Merkel and to the German people for having this kind of dope supposedly representing me on the International stage.

By the way: Look at the leer on the guy in the background. Is he a secret service member? He's obviously 'in' on it.

Cross-posted at Night Bird's Fountain.

The Great Debate

Actually it was a candidate's forum. This evening, the Little Colorado River Democrats hosted a debate for Democratic candidates running against Rick Renzi in Arizona congressional district 1.

Five Democrats are running. The 'presumed' front-runner (as annointed by the media and the national party in the absence of any data) is Ellen Simon, but she missed the debate because she was in Washington chasing campaign dollars (pretty much lost my vote, which was ripe for the picking when she made that choice-- that's how Rick Renzi does things, and I don't think we can beat Rick Renzi by running Rick Renzi against him.) I did talk to her husband, who was there, and the president of our club read a fax she sent but other than that, she was mostly present only by being the subject of barbs by some of the other candidates.

The four candidates who were there had a lively forum. They were Mike Cacciopoli, Bob Donahue, Susan Friedman and Vic McKerlie (although we drew randomly for it, they ended up sitting in alphabetical order across the stage.) Winslow city councilwoman Sue Bumpus moderated the debate and the panel was composed of reporters from the Arizona Daily Sun, the Winslow Mail and the Navajo Times.

Clearly Cacciopoli was the most inspiring speaker, and I would have to say that he won the debate. He did say a couple of things that raised a few eyebrows, including his call for a special prosecutor to be called to investigate whether Bush broke any laws before and during the Iraq war. A friend of mine who described herself as 'anti-Cacciopoli' before the debate said that he may have opened a window for her. For me too-- he is right about nearly every issue-- but I'm having a tough time with a huge one.

And that huge one is that he won't necessarily endorse the winner. We both know that means that if he loses and Ellen Simon wins then he probably won't endorse her (as being a 'party' candidate, as opposed to a grassroots candidate. One of the questions from the audience asked whether each candidate would support any of the others, and Mike was very hesitant to answer this question.

Susan Freidman came across as sincere, progressive and thoughtful (which those of us who have talked to her before know is the case). She has worked very hard over the years for the party, and she did run for the legislature one year. She has very little charisma, but she is right on the issues.

Bob Donahue, who also ran in the 2004 primary against Paul Babbitt, is a Vietnam veteran who made it clear that he believes that we are repeating the same mistakes we made there in Iraq. On social issues, he seemed to trend more to the center. He also has thought things through quite a bit, and made a very strong case for raising the minimum wage, cutting through the rhetoric of Republicans who claim it will cost jobs by asking how many jobs that today pay $5.15 an hour aren't in fact worth $7.00 an hour. And his point is accurate-- very few of them aren't worth that. In places where the job market is tight (though not here, unfortunately) even traditional minimum wage jobs (i.e. burger flipper) often pay $7 or more an hour.

Vic McKerlie sort of unimpressed me. He's a good guy and he's right about the need for health care for all Americans, but his first question was about proposition 200 (the Republican party's 'baby' on last election's ballot which as interpreted by Jan Brewer will likely disenfranchise a lot of Navajos and other minority voters) and he wasn't even sure what 'prop 200' was. Then on so many other issues, and especially on immigration and Iraq, he sounded like he's been listening to Rush, or at least reading Republican talking points. If he is the nominee I will support him but I became convinced last night that I won't support him in the primary. That's OK, because he probably won't win.

Not exactly Veto Genovese.

President Bush finally vetoed a bill.

He vetoed the bill providing for Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Now, I suppose that you think this post is going to be about stem cells. But it's not. I've read probably close to a dozen posts on stem cells today on various blogs ranging from extreme left to center-right, so the topic has been pretty well covered by now. If you can't find a post on stem cells somewhere then you aren't looking very hard (and I've blogged on them before).

This post is going to be about vetoes.

The President has not vetoed a single bill in five and a half years, until today.
There are several reasons for this.

The first one is obvious enough but bears repeating anyway. The President is a member of the same party as is predominant in the House and Senate. So, most of the legislation they have sent him, he's signed enthusiastically. For awhile, Tom DeLay could get pretty much any product that he wanted, on the customers desk. So when the President wanted a bill, DeLay delivered the votes. So of course, President Bush never vetoed a bill, because he and DeLay had choreographed what they wanted in them months ealier.

There is another, more insidious reason the President has not previously issued a veto. That is because he has often accompanied the signing of bills that he does not like with 'signing statements' in which he claims the right to negate parts or all of them. The most obvious example of this was the prohibition on torture that the Senate passed. He signed it with a statement that he could ignore the provisions 'in the event of a national emergency.' Since he also gets to decide when it is a 'national emergency,' the effect of this is that he ignores the law and acts as though it didn't exist (essentially returning to the conditions that caused the Senate to pass the law in the first place.) What this makes it clear is that this President believes he is above the law. If there was one thing that Watergate showed, it is that the President is not above the law. But then that Congress was far more willing than this one to hold the President accountable for breaking the law.

This being an eleection year, however, and with the President's ratings in the toilet and DeLay gone, it's not so surprising that Republicans in Congress would like to show that they are independent. And the President would have a tough time issuing a signing statement that included a national security exemption to a bill on stem cell research. At the end of the day though, the house failed to override his veto, indicating that he still has the ability to tell them what to do, at least in terms of the end result.

So inefficient you have to pay for it.

As Lebanon has become a war zone, with Israeli airstrikes around Beirut and throughout the country, and heavy fighting in the south between Israeli army units and Hezbollah guerillas, many nations have ordered evacuations of their citizens. And they've been getting them out. Over three thousand Danes, along with very large numbers of French, Russians and others.

Except not very many Americans. Not that they aren't there, they just aren't getting out. It seems the same paralysis that affected our Federal government last year after Katrina (and still is, as refugees remain spread out over at least a dozen states, many still waiting for FEMA trailers that were promised last year), has defined our response in this emergency. And no, you can't just blame Israel for that either; They have allowed foreign ships to evacuate refugees, and other nations have had far better success in getting their citizens out.

Our response, in contrast, was not only to not get them out, but then to announce that they would be billed for the cost of an evacuation. Yes, that's right-- the law says to force people who are running for their lives trying to escape from a war zone to sign a slip of paper saying that they will be billed, before they can get out. And if they can't pay, then that's tough-- I guess they will be left standing on the dock with bombs falling behind them. So much for the notion that the primary duty of a government is to protect its citizens.

Luckily, after taking some real serious heat on this issue, the President waived the fee. A tad late, suggesting that in fact he wouldn't have if there had not been such a collective exclaimation of horror from across the nation:

The announcement came after stranded Americans, along with politicians and their families back home, expressed anger with the situation.

Some complained about the process and what they saw as the slow pace at which the State Department is evacuating Americans from Lebanon. Others were outraged that the evacuees were going to have to pay for the ride.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the government would have charged evacuees commercial rates to take them out by plane or boat.

The Bush administration claimed that this was the result of a 1956 law. But it is actually in accordance with the administration's initial interpretation of that law. In past conflicts, Americans have not been billed for such emergency actions.

I can see, for example, billing someone who defies an evacuation order, either during a war, or for example ahead of a hurricane, if the direct result of their refusal costs the state money (i.e. having to extricate them later). I can see billing a lost hiker if their misfortune is a direct result of their own hard headedness (though not if it is reasonably not their fault, for example if they fall down a steep slope or get caught in a freak snowstorm). But the Bush administration take on the law is akin to if the government began billing Katrina survivors who are still in refugee camps for the ground they are sleeping on every night. Maybe I shouldn't get so sarcastic because with this crew, who don't believe the government should do anything for anybody if at all possible, they might just be dreaming up something like that.

The price of thumbing your nose at the world-- they won't be there when you need them.

A few weeks ago, I blogged on how Zarqawi's cellphone contained the numbers of some members of the government that we helped set up.

In that post I wrote,

"You're either with us or you're with the terrorists."

Those were the words of George W. Bush when describing the war on terror. And it is in a larger degree, a reflection of the conservative view of the world, the one you see on all those old westerns, war movies and cop shows, where there is no shade of grey, only larger than life heroes who stand for everything that is good, decent and right, and villainous villains that stand for nothing but evil. There is no room in this view for moral relativism, or the idea that the good guys might be fighting for anything other than a righteous cause....

Where the conservative view falls apart however, is that the idea of 'with us or against us' rarely if ever applies in the Byzantine world of Middle Eastern politics....

It is in fact that way across the middle east. The United States is just one of many players in an arena full of shifting allegiances, where the enemy of my enemy is my friend, until I make friends with my enemy, when his enemy becomes my enemy. People who live there understand that.

And President Bush's predecessors understood that. That is why his father was able to broker a coalition to go after Saddam in 1991, even including Syria. Not only did Syrian tanks take part in the invasion of Kuwait, but the fact that Syria was in the coalition probably reduced the resistance the coalition faced as the Iraqis had to divert troops to their northern border even though in the end there was no invasion from Syrian territory. He could not have done that if he hadn't at least kept the lines of communication open. Bill Clinton kept them open with the Iranians and in fact a gradual thaw in relations was happening during his term. And when Israel did withdraw from southern Lebanon several years ago, it was after receiving assurances that guerillas (at that time) would not launch rockets into Israel-- assurances that given the support Hezbollah has always had from Tehran, had to have involved Iran. And even keeping some sort of a channel open to the leaders of terrorist groups themselves, have at times been useful in for example, gathering information on rival groups and arranging the release of prisoners (yeah, we never negotiate with terrorists-- if you believe that then you probably believe WMD's were found in Iraq.)

George W. Bush, however, by taking a largely black-and-white view, and further by taking a 'my way or the highway' approach on everything from terrorism to Iraq, has painted himself into a corner. So we now see today's article, U.S. options few as Mideast erupts.

WASHINGTON - The United States has few options and limited leverage as old animosities in the Middle East overtake hopes for peace and democracy.

One problem is there aren't many people the U.S. can talk to....

The United States has no diplomatic relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza Strip, militant groups fighting with Israel. The United States also has no relations with one of their backers, Iran, and only limited dialogue with the other principal backer, Syria.

Another problem is that the people the United States can talk to aren't able or willing to do as much as President Bush would like.

Moderate arab governments might be useful to us in say, Iraq, but are more afraid of their own people if they made a deal to help us end a war that would leave Israel pretty much unscathed, than they are of us (and there's always that darned oil addiction that gets in the way-- they know we won't stop trading with them because we aren't willing to pay $5 a gallon at the pump). The Europeans, who have their own large and politically powerful Muslim populations, certainly feel that the goodwill that they had towards America in the days after 9/11 has been squandered by an American administration which wanted to use them as 'supporters' but refused to even ask their advice on how to fight the Afghan war or deal with Iraq, where they believe that we are now reaping the seeds that George Bush sewed. The only real card that Washington holds anymore is that we can talk to the Israelis more firmly than probably anyone else, but the Israelis also have a mind of their own, and it is unlikely that Israel is in any mood to talk right now. If negotiations occur later, bringing that one card to the table won't make for a very strong hand by Washington, particularly in a Middle East where the view that they have of us will be filtered through the past and present in Iraq.

Clearly, a new war in the Middle East endangers everything from our efforts in Iraq to the already weakening economy. But George W. Bush has very little he can do about it. That's because when you burn your bridges, they aren't there when you need them.

The consequences of this, fall where they may, is that we are now past the 'cowboy diplomacy' stages of the Bush administration and now have to deal with the fallout from electing a rigid and stubborn [mule] to do a job that requires a diplomat.

Seems Munsil is willing to accept fraud, and is willing to exploit a tragedy for political gain.

I'd like to thank two of my blogger buddies, Tedski over at Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, for first bringing this to my attention, and Blue Republic blogger forum for helping me think through this post and laying it out.

Len Munsil, the leading GOP candidate for Governor writes on his blog criticizing Governor Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Terry Goddard:

Arizona is No. 1 in the nation in crime, and has been for the entire time Janet Napolitano and Terry Goddard have been in office. At least two serial killers and rapists are on the loose in the Phoenix area, causing some communities to be "paralyzed by fear." He then goes on to criticize the Governor for being against littering and the Attorney General for filing suit against Wal-Mart for consumer fraud.

Leaving aside the obvious (namely, that we were on top of that list before they came in, which is interesting because Republicans pretty much ran the state for over a decade), I'd like to point out a couple of other things.

First, both the Governor and the Attorney General have pushed for more funds for local police. It is the Republican legislature that has chosen not to appropriate them.

Second, the reason we are at the top is pretty plain-- we have 962 motor vehicle thefts per 100,000 population, way ahead of the rest of the nation. Of course, Arizona's population centers are much closer to Mexico than the population centers in the other border states (except maybe California, which has a relatively short international border), so the reason why is hardly a mystery. In fact, our rate of motor vehicle theft is so out of whack that it is just a smidgen below the burglary rate (so that for every whatever else is stolen, a car is stolen). Ultimately this is a border security problem, which the Governor has been working hard to address (contrary to GOP protestations).

Third, if you want to blame the incumbents for high crime rates, then consider that sheriff Joe has been running his 'tent city' for decades, long before they came in, and a lot more criminals have experienced Sheriff Joe's green bologna than have had anything to do with either the Governor or the Attorney General. Seems like his prisons aren't much of a deterrent-- especially for car thieves.

Fourth, it appears that in Munsil-land, there is only room for certain crimes. So presumably if he becomes Governor he won't bother to tell people not to toss trash on our highways, and he fully supports the rights of retailers to defraud their customers. Heck, if you follow that to its logical conclusion, he will make fraud legal so that it won't show up as a crime, and therefore our crime rate will go down, and he will run again in four years taking credit.

However, these points are relatively minor. The really disturbing thing here is that he is blaming the Governor and the Attorney General for the two psychopathic murderers who have been roiling Phoenix for the past few weeks. Leaving aside the fact that until we catch these guys (and I hope its very soon), we have no idea of who they are or what set them off. So to blame anyone without some level of information is very wrong indeed, and to then use the murders of at least ten people to make political points is despicable.

Mideast war

There is a new war now going on in the middle east, or perhaps I should say yet another chapter of a very, very old war, with the Israeli army fighting (separately) Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon. In the process of this war, rockets and missiles have been launched into civilian population centers (by Hezbollah) and infrastructure, government buildings and a major international airport have been bombed (by Israel).

While there is no question that Israel has been responsible for a lot of provocations and has certainly ratcheted up the stakes in this war with their invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, it has become increasingly harder for me to condemn anything that they do. That is because every time things cool down and there is some semblance of peace, it always seems to be the Palestinians or Hezbollah who break the cease-fire.

Since withdrawing from the Gaza strip six months ago, Israel has on the whole showed restraint in the face of rocket attacks and other actions against their territory (and the fact that some of the rockets have come from Gaza, despite the fact that until a week ago there had been no Israeli occupation in Gaza since the pullout, shows that for many Palestinians it isn't about fighting 'occupation' at all, but about killing Israelis). And the announcement just before this all started up again, now buried and forgotten under the rubble of war, that Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had agreed on the text of a joint declaration that implicitly, though not explicitly, recognized Israel, was earth shattering in itself, and showed that ever so slowly, the wheels of progress were beginning to turn. I had blogged following the stunning victory by Hamas in January's election about how I was optimistic in the long term (though pessimistic in the short term) about the prospects for peace, as Hamas would, because of the day by day mundane matters of running a government, be forced to soften their views and eventually at least in fact, if not in word, recognize Israel. And the joint declaration of two weeks ago seemed to bear this out, as it was historic in being the first time that the leaders of Hamas had ever expressed a willingness to put their name on a document that in any way recognized Israel.

So why are things so very different this week? It began when Hamas failed to crack down on attacks against Israel by Islamic Jihad and other groups. Israel responded by airstrikes against members of these groups, where they could be found, and also against Palestinian government offices, which they did back when Yassir Arafat was President and was failing to restrain militants. Hamas responded by calling off their self-imposed 'truce,' and in an obviously well planned attack, Palestinian militants operating out of the Gaza strip dug a tunnel under the border, and kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Israel blamed Hamas, and statements to the contrary, this seems to be a particularly good assumption because Hamas has a much better organization in the strip than other terror groups, and the military precision with which the attack was carried out seems to indicated a well-organized, disciplined group with generous support, hence Hamas. Since then of course war has broken out. The Israelis know their soldier is being held somewhere in Gaza, and his recovery is their top priority. Whether Hamas was trying to placate their own base (who still want to annihilate Israel) after agreeing to the document, whether they believed that seizing the soldier would lead to negotiations for an exchange of prisoners, or whether they simply planned to use him for propaganda purposes, it is clear that they made a disastrous miscalculation.

The second theater of this war is in Lebanon. After the Gaza battle broke out, Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon began firing rockets into towns in northern Israel. This caused Israel to attack into Lebanon to cripple Hezbollah's capabilities to launch more rocket attacks. In the ensuing fighting, the guerillas proved themselves to be more adept at short range fighting than Israel had estimated (another disastrous miscalculation, this time by Israel) and they captured two more Israeli soldiers. Israel responded with a full scale invasion of the area and airstrikes against not only Hezbollah, but Lebanese government targets (the Lebanese government is weak and sponsors Hezbollah partly because they don't have any choice not to, but would likely sponsor them even if they could do anything about them.) Hezbollah launched two long range missiles, which the Israelis didn't know they had, into the city of Haifa, deep inside of Israel (likely they had planned to launch them at a time when such an event would have really embarrassed the Israelis, such as when a U.S. leader was visiting, but with the Israeli army on the move in southern Lebanon, were faced with a 'use them or lose them' situation). Israel quickly learned from their intelligence network that Hezbollah planned to fly the captured soldiers out to Iran, and bombed the Beirut airport to prevent the flight. The bombing closed the airport for the forseeable future and probably won't help recover the soldiers (who could easily be transported across the border into Syria, and then flown to Iran when their captors believe they have sufficiently covered their tracks.)

What we see then is one escalation, then another and then another. However, as I said above, while believing that Israel has certainly contributed to the current situation, I have to support their right to respond, since response requires a first act, and unfortunately, it seems that (with the exception of the 1967 war) every time something like this starts, the first shot always seems to be taken by their opponents.

Catch either of these guys, do the right thing, and also get $100,000

Police sketch of the 'Baseline rapist' who has killed six.

There are serial killers every now and then, the ones who keep a community on the edge. Sickos who get people, especially women, to start locking their windows at night, looking over their shoulders, and rarely to venture out alone.

Phoenix police however are now baffled by the appearance of two serial killers, apparently both operating in the same area at the same time.

One of them is someone who has shot 34 people over the past year, killing four. All of the victims were either walking or riding bicycles. Apparently at least two different guns were used, and the shooter rarely misses, so they believe that the shooter is a good shot. No one has seen the suspect, so that is about all the police have to go on right now. Based on his pattern, police believe that the suspect may be a west valley resident. He may be driving a light colored Sedan.

The second is the so-called 'Baseline rapist,' who has raped a lot of women, attacking twenty times, and killing six. In fact, today they announced that he has been tied to another homicide several months ago in Tempe, which is odd because the Tempe police claim to have solved that one and have a suspect, who they say confessed, already in jail for that crime. Obviously, either an innocent man is in jail in Tempe facing murder charges, or Phoenix police are so clueless in their pursuit of the Baseline rapist that they are claiming he committed a murder that someone else has already confessed to. The Baseline rapist was named because a number of his crimes occurred along Baseline road, and police believe that he may be a resident of east-central Phoenix.

Police are certain that the two are acting independently and have nothing to do with each other (although one fear is that having them both making headlines at the same time could spur a perverse sort of cross-valley murder contest.)

If you see or know anything about either of these killers, a reward of $100,000 is offered.

The only previous case I know of where two serial killers operated in the same community at the same time is when Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer were operating in Seattle.

The Real Lost Boys (and it's usually not a happy ending).

I've decided to add another link to my 'other sites' listings. I'm doing it because of a tragedy that has been underreported in the recent rush of stories about the FLDS church (no connection at all to the actual LDS church, to which I belong, and which banned polygamy in 1890) and its leader, Warren Jeffs, who is now on the FBI's ten most wanted list for, among other crimes, child rape, for his role in forcing underage girls to get married to old men who already have multiple wives.

Now, I want to say at the outset that what any number of consenting adults does, is not the state's business. However, in this case, we see girls who have been forced to drop out of junior high school being forced into marriages with men old enough to be their grandfathers. Neither the word, 'consenting' nor the word, 'adult' applies here, so this is child rape, pure and simple.

What has not been reported much is what has happened to the 'lost boys.' We are talking about those boys who have been raised in the polygamist community, consisting of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah (what amounts to a border straddling community is one of the ploys they have used for years to dodge various court orders and other matters that involve jurisdiction). If you do the math, you will realize that in order to maintain a polygamist community, they have only two choices. One is to go out and convert a bunch of females (one reason why it is highly advisable for women to avoid stopping there when traveling alone, especially with baby girls-- my wife once had to stop there with my two young daughters, who had to use the restroom on their way back from my mother in law's house, while I was working, and 'uncomfortable,' and even 'threateningly uncomfortable' are mild compared to the creepy kind of terror she felt as some of the men in the store looked the young girls over). In today's day and age, such kidnappings or very hard sell conversions are rare though, and they don't want to involve Federal Authorities, so while there are plenty of rumors that this used to happen, it apparently isn't happening now.

The other way is to get rid of some young males. And that is the way they do it. The 'lost boys' as they are called, are teenagers, raised in the insular fundamentalist community where they have probably read the Book of Mormon only (this community is so fundamentalist that some families don't even read the Bible) and who usually about 15 or 16-- though some have been as young as 13, on the pretext of committing the smallest transgression, are dumped in some nearby town and left there. The families file runaway reports with the local police in order to protect themselves legally.

These boys have very few skills to make it in the outside world. They do probably possess rudimentary construction skills (when driving through Colorado City, as I have many times, it's not hard to pick out the polygamist homes-- large, unfinished homes that look like under construction hotels, except they aren't.) Their reading and schooling level is junior high level at best (and they know one or perhaps two books (if they come from a family 'enlightened' enough to read the Bible), as described above, mostly from memory, but know virtually nothing else that might be read about). They have been forbidden since infancy to speak to females except for their mothers (who they have several of), and so have no social skills at all when it comes to knowing how to talk to or relate to a female at or near their own age.

Many of them when they get out into the world, end up in prison, sexually abused by older men or women who 'take them in,' drug addicts, or dead. Others stay together and live in small groups, finding what work they can, in towns across southern Utah (very cosmopolitan to these boys, though my wife is from one of these towns, and thinks Flagstaff is a big city.) And ironically, as white males, they don't even qualify for any kind of affirmative action, so that they don't have any preferences when trying to find work either.

A past they can't go back to, a present they don't understand and have trouble surviving in, and a future that is devoid of hope.

And that is where the link comes in. It is a link to the Diversity Foundation, an organization founded by Sandy, Utah dentist Dan Fischer, himself a former FLDS member (more on that here). Fischer has taken in about fifty of the boys.

Fischer wants to stop the church's most extreme practices, so he can stop cleaning up the mess. In the high stakes legal game to end the FLDS as an institution, he could be the unwitting sculptor of a new legal definition for freedom of religion. Fischer maintains that, while they have the right to practice their beliefs, religious institutions don't have the power to disrupt and exploit lives.

Polygamy's enemies have long argued the practice means exploitation for young women and even girls trafficked among older men. The Lost Boys lawsuit is perhaps the first to point out that young men can suffer polygamy's effects as well. They may not lose their sexual innocence, but ejected from a religious community and mindset they've known from infancy, they can be rendered homeless and hopeless.

Fischer requires that the boys keep out of trouble and go to school while they live with him. Some of his opponents claim that he is using it to promote his dental business. Whether he is or not is actually immaterial-- if he wasn't doing this, there is no one else who would.

I think this is important enough to put up the site, because until a couple of years ago, this was going on just as much, but was completely ignored and not covered. Still pretty close to that.

Attorney General Sues Wal-Mart for Consumer Fraud.

Last April, I blogged (Wal-Mart hires ethics director) about how the world's wealthiest but most ethically challenged retailer was hiring an ethics director to help it clean up its image after being caught on the wrong side of both the law and basic human decency over and over and over.

So did the ethics training help?

Well, apparently it didn't do much, at least according to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, who filed suit against Wal-Mart on Thursday (and also against Auto Zone) for consumer fraud, after both companies allegedly violated state law by failing to post prices on some items. Prior to 1993, the law had stated that prices had to be stamped on each item. It was revised in that year (because of the use of optical scanners) to state that the price had to be listed nearby. What Goddard's investigators comfirmed however was that in some cases the prices were not listed, while another (generally lower price) for a similar item (which the customer would likely not notice unless (s)he looked very carefully at the bar code) was listed where a customer would logically look.

To be honest, this one did surprise me just a little bit. Wal-Mart has never had a problem giving the shaft to their employees, nor with giving the shaft to the American labor force (by outsourcing jobs), nor with giving the shaft to foreign workers (by using sweatshop labor), nor with giving the shaft to the taxpayers (by paying their employees so low that they have to depend on welfare or other state benefits to get by on).

But this is the first time I specifically have heard of them giving the shaft to customers. But it probably won't be the last. For a company this unethical, it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't figure out some more ways to screw the customer.